About the blog

This blog is about both scientific, societal/political, and yoga-related issues - individually and considered as different aspects of the same problem/solution. A longer description is found in the first blog entry, and all old posts are found in a structured way here. The blog is an extension of my main home pages yoga-link.se and isbgroup.eu. Twitter: @gunnarcedersund

So...let’s
now embark on this journey - towards an integral worldview!

And, I
think the best way to start is, as in so many other cases, by first looking a
little bit back. Let’s do like in the transformation of Ebenezer Scrooge, in the
fairy tale by Charles Dickens: let’s listen to the Ghost of Christmases Past,
and understand how we actually got to the situation where we are now.

Illustration by John Leech, from the original publishing of the book.
For another blog post on this story, go here.

From complete integration to full-blown
materialism – the first climax

Let us
first recall that this current sub-division we have between the various parts
of our knowledge-system, and between these parts and the entire worldview, has
not always been the case. On the contrary, in the old Antique developments,
there was basically only one scientific discipline – called philosophy – and it
included all relevant aspects that we consider here, both regarding the outer
and the inner worlds. All of these aspects were viewed as things that naturally
goes together, and that cannot be understood in a good way if considered
separately.

Let us then
go to the early 16th century, and to the birth of modern science. At
this point, the church had complete control of all allowed truths, both
regarding spiritual things, and regarding worldly matters, and these two sides
weren’t really distinguished. Part of this prevailing worldview was
that the Earth was in the middle of the Universe, a fact that was based on some
related statements in the Bible, which then was the ultimate source of
knowledge. Into this picture enters now some scientists: Copernicus, Kepler,
Galilei, Newton, etc. Of perhaps most interest right now is Galileo Galilei,
since it was he that laid down many of the principles behind modern science. With
quite some justification, he is often referred to as the father of modern
science. Perhaps most importantly, what he introduced was the principle of
experimental tests. The type of things he said was of the following character:
“I have another idea of how the world works: that the Sun is in the middle. I
think that we should find out who is right, by experimentally testing which of
our two theories gives the best predictions. Let’s ask the Book of Nature, not
the Book of the Bible” Noteworthy here is that, although he was widely
condemned and punished by the church for his writings, he was – in fact – a quite
religious man. He also had a relatively sound view of how to combine the two
aspects of his belief: for matters regarding how the world works, go to the
Book of Nature, and for matters that has to do with the upliftenment of the
human spirits, go to the Bible. The two books come from the same
author, so they cannot be in true conflict, he believed.

This
religiousness, and this complete and non-problematic integration of the
religious beliefs with his natural science investigations, also held for Isaac
Newton. What is characteristic with him, is that he introduced physical laws,
laws that are universal and works in the same way for small objects in everyday
life as they do for the heavenly bodies in the sky. He could use these very
simple laws to derive the old predictions of the previous scientists, and could
thereby predict the stellar movements in a quite detailed fashion. There were, however,
some things he could not explain, and these observed abnormalitiesand deviations he simply said were evidence of God’s intervention. Newton’s laws
were then prevailing for several centuries, and the predictive power and the
universality of these laws were starting to impress more and more people. So,
when Laplace in the 18th century were able to find natural
explanations for one after the other of the previously identified abnormalities
– which had been used as evidences for the interventions and existence of God –
this
then logically led to the interesting question of whether there at all was a
God? Was God just an unnecessary hypothesis, one that science could do equally
well without.The idea of the completely deterministic and
law-abiding universe was a fact, and was a theory that, once formulated,
started to get a stronger and stronger foothold within peoples’ consciousness.

Galileo Galilei, the Father of Modern Science, who introduced many of the most important scientific principles that we go by also today. Picture from Wikipedia.

A temporary return to spirituality before the
next big debate starts

After this
peak during the enlightenment came the Romantic age. During this era, the
spiritual side got a little re-boost, and people were starting to revere Nature,
which often was referred to with a capital N. If the Book of Nature is the best
and most reliable source of knowledge, let us revere it. At this point, it was
still typically believed that even though physical laws existed, the human mind
and its free will was not under their influence. Similarly, Man was with his
mental capacities higher than the beasts, and that was the way God – who now
was thought of often as the clock-maker, who at the beginning of time had set
everything in motion – had intended it. In other words, religion had been
forced to a big retreat, but a new balance had been restored.

With this
in mind, it is not so strange that the theories of Darwin still were perceived
as such a serious threat. If Man was not special, and if Nature hadn’t been
designed by a God – if God also in biology turned out to be an unnecessary
hypotheses – then the newly found balance was lost, and they would be forced to
new retreats. Therefore, huge fights broke out, partially within the religious
and academic societies, but most importantly between them. And, as always in fights, the other side is painted in the bleakest possible colors. In bitter
fights, you define yourself not only in positive terms, but in negative terms.
“I am nothing like them”. I think that this is one of the reasons for the,
since then, quite hostile attitude that exists within science towards anything
that could be viewed as non-physical or spiritual. Those are things that have
to do with religion, and we – scientists – are nothing like those idiots. It would therefore be interesting to know if things would have played out differently if religion already from the onset had taken the viewpoint that already Galilei had: to embrace new scientific results as steps forward in the overall search for Truth. Perhaps then the divide might not be so big today, and perhaps then science would still deal with the big overall challenge of producing worldviews?

Illustration in the New York Times of the so-called Monkey trial, July 12, 1925.

The counter-acting trends: the system and
integration trends

At this
point in history, in the early 1900s, we are more or less at the point of
division that has remained ever since. The Darwin debate is often said to have
had its climax around 1925, with the so-called Monkey trial. In Europe,
this trial was followed with some irony and distance, almost as if it was the
final remains of a debate that was more or less over already, whereas in the U.S.
the following was much more fierce. Amazingly, this debate is still ongoing in
the U.S., e.g. regarding what must, can, and cannot be taught in school regarding
evolution. The key thing is that religious people want evolution to be
explained as just another theory. I hope that I through these texts can pervey
to those for whom it is not clear already that all scientific claims are just
theories, but that that does not mean that all theories are equally credible.

However,
let us finally examine shortly some of the parallel trends that have occurred during
the previous century within the science/spirituality interface, which also are
what leads up to the worldview that will be outlined here. As explained already
in the first video, much of these developments have to do with the developments
within theoretical physics, i.e. within quantum mechanics and relativity
theory. These theories lead to insights that are so far away from everyday experiences
that they invariably leads to questions of a philosophical/worldview nature.

Also, some
of these results are a reversal of the reductionism-trend that had been going
on for the last 4 centuries. As described above, the first such separation was that of physics and
astronomy from philosphy/religion, and this continued with the splitting off of chemistry,
biology, biochemistry, etc, i.e. to create ever smaller and ever more
specialized fields. Similarly, this reductionism also implied the belief that
it was enough to understand each component, the smallest components, in
isolation, and that once that was done, the rest was just logical consequences;
no higher orders of organization exists as independent units of their own. This
started to be challenged within quantum mechanics. In this, it was realized
that really small particles behave in a quite different way from our normal big
particles: they can be viewed as non-local, i.e. as existing virtually everywhere, but with different probabilities. Similarly,
if these particles come together, e.g. as a proton and an electron does in a hydrogen
atom, the connected atom is not just the sum of the two individual components,
but something different (technically, because a coupling term appears). This and
other similar results within theoretical physics can be seen as the start of
the systems trend, saying that reductionism has a limit. This insight has then
been followed in many other fields as well. One of these is systems biology,
which is the field within which I am active, and which takes the view that a
cell can not be understood by studying its constituent proteins isolated from
the cell one-by-one, but that these proteins must be studied in their living
context. But there are also other examples, including sociology, cultural
history, systems theory, etc. Finally, these developments have also been paralleled
in worldview developments. Already in the early developments, several of the
foreground figures had quite philosophical, sometimes even spiritual,
interpretations of the results. And this
has then been further developed in other fields, which for instance include
systems theology, which basically is a way to interpret Christianity which embraces
and fully incorporates the latest results within modern science. But a
more detailed discussion of these things will have to wait for future posts.

Essay and further reading

As I said
already in the first blog post, it is my clear intent to try to merge this worldview development with
mainstream science as much as possible, and to thereby create an almost
continuous bridge from the really popular science summary view in the youtube
videos, to these slightly more detailed blog posts, via more extensive text
books, all the way in to ordinary scientific publications. Associated to this
blog post, I therefore want to point to an essay that I wrote about 8-9 years
ago, which deals with almost the exact same topic. In this, you will have a
slightly more extensive description of the above historical processes, which
also contains references to text books, papers, and other material for even further
reading. This essay has not been published in a scientific journal, but it was approved as an essay in a course I took within the university. Finally, this
essay also deals with much of the material that will be posted in the last two
posts in this preparatory series: “Is this really a possible goal?”, and “Can
one define God in a strict yet useful manner?”. After that foundation is laid, we will go in to a
new series of 8-10 blogs with some really cool stuff!

I therefore end this blog post in the same way as I begin the above essay: with a quote from Einstein.

What is our lives' meaning, what meaning is there at all for livingcreatures? To be able to give an answer to these questions is to bereligious. You ask: Is there then any point in asking that question?I answer: A person that does not consider his own, and his fellowhuman being's life as meaningful, is not only unhappy, he is hardlyalive.

About me

I am a yoga-teacher in the tantric tradition, but also a scientist, and an engaged citizen. Politically, I am engaged in e.g. democracy, internet freedom, human rights, alternative economic theories, and environmental issues. Scientifically, I am working with systems biology, and the study of complex systems on all levels (isbgroup.eu). Yoga-wise, I am teaching and interested in classical yoga, where you take a holistic view, and merge not only physical exercises with breathing exercises and meditation, but also those things with karma yoga (harmonious working), dancing, music, sex, and all the rest of it. See http://yoga-link.se Twitter: @gunnarcedersund